Kant

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

Kant, Immanuel 1724-1804. German philosopher whose synthesis of rationalism and empiricism, in which he argued that reason is the means by which the phenomena of experience are translated into understanding, marks the beginning of idealism. His classic works include Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Critique of Practical Reason (1788), in which he put forward a system of ethics based on the categorical imperative.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

proper n. A city in Kyrgyzstan

proper n. A small lunar impact crater that is located to the northwest of the prominent Cyrillus crater

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

Examples

"Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant" is that the loss of "the architectonic unity of the system ... marks the undoing of the aesthetic as a valid category" and "undoes the very project of such a philosophy"

Kant is far too good a philosopher to traffic in the usual 18th-century aesthetic concept of "rummaging among the details of individual subjectivity for the grounds of the aesthetic," as James Kirwan puts it, but he doesn't really come up with anything solid in its place, even as Enlightenment habit causes him to maintain the possibility of a universally valid judgement.

As Kirwan explains (clearer than Kant does), in Kant's aesthetics, an aesthetic judgement is not something you do, it's something that happens to you, and the philosophical circle to be squared is in knowing that such a judgement is, in fact, happening.

He clearly attacks the Kantian division of the real and apparent worlds (the reality perceived by our senses, according to Kant, is the apparent world, while the true reality exists outside of perception) in Twilight of the Idols, where he writes “The ‘apparent’ world is the only one: the ‘real’ world has only been lyingly added.”

We can question whether this would work in practice (i.e., he doesn't allow for civil disobedience, or conscientious objection, etc.) but what's moving about Kant is that the call to enlightenment is no less than "treating the human being in accordance with his dignity."